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Public opinion about supposedly ‘vulnerable’ Islamist men on an international level has become so ‘toxic’ that the Guardian no longer wants to offer up its comments section as a vehicle through which people all around the world can say things that the Guardian editors and journalists don’t agree with.

See here:

Guardian, ‘The readers’ editor on… handling comments below the line’, Stephen Pritchard, 31 Jan 2016 (emphasis added):

[...]

Certain subjects – race, immigration and Islam in particular – attract an unacceptable level of toxic commentary, believes Mary Hamilton, our executive editor, audience. “The overwhelming majority of these comments tend towards racism, abuse of vulnerable subjects, author abuse and trolling, and the resulting conversations below the line bring very little value but cause consternation and concern among both our readers and our journalists,” she said last week.

As a result, it had been decided that comments would not be opened on pieces on those three topics unless the moderators knew they had the capacity to support the conversation and that they believed a positive debate was possible.

The policy would be worldwide, applying to our UK, US and Australia offices, as the issues were global. And, where they were open, it was likely that threads would close sooner than the typical three-day window.

[...]

This was not a retreat from commenting as a whole, she said; it was an acknowledgement, however, that some conversations had become toxic at an international level – “a change in mainstream public opinion and language that we do not wish to see reflected or supported on the site”.

[...]

Totally exploitable.

This is almost like a return to the 1970s, except with a massively expanded infrastructure for communication, which results in black propaganda and grey propaganda being pushed by all sides of the political spectrum until one side finally cries out in pain and shuts everything down.

The difference now is that if the Guardian staff refuse to facilitate these conversations because they find it to be too painful, it won’t make them go away, it just means that these conversations will be shifted to other locations which are not under the watch of people in their political camp.

One thing that social democrats have never been able to understand is how to win at Information Operations (IO). They had forgotten that some audiences are more sophisticated than others, and that in a completely globalised communication environment in which the internet ‘remembers everything’, their attempts to fabricate a false reality to support their political positions in different temporal and geographical contexts will always be exposed. There will always be some commenter who will ask “Why did they say this thing here, but then this other thing over here? It’s contradictory! It makes no sense at all!”

For example, if a news organisation, such as perhaps the Guardian, or the Huffington Post, writes articles in its North America edition that try to induce feelings of guilt and paralysis among the Americans of European descent by taking the position that the Pilgrims who landed in North America on the Mayflower were actually a collection of religious fundamentalists who ended up carrying out genocide and were subsequently hated and reviled by the Amerindians, then that is an anti-Pilgrim line they can take. It’s based on reality so a person could indeed say it. But they would have to be consistent about it.

A problem emerges for that newspaper if it should happen to mysteriously become pro-Pilgrim in a Middle East and North African context, where the Islamist reactionary ‘refugees’ who are fleeing from the Middle East and North Africa to find ‘a new life’ in Europe, are presented as being beyond reproach because of their similarity to the American Pilgrims. American Pilgrims who are suddenly recast as noble heroes fleeing from a supposedly repressive Europe to find ‘a new life’ in the Americas. ‘Pilgrims fleeing repression’ is also a narrative based on reality. But its moral content and implied policy prescriptions are 180 degrees opposite to that of the aforementioned anti-Pilgrim narrative.

It’s 2016, social democrats. If you constantly contradict yourselves like that, then it becomes possible to find the key which is held in common between the different kinds of propaganda you are creating, by simply comparing them to each other. That’s something which is pretty trivial to do in the era of digital media. So that happened, and will continue to happen.

I would say to everyone who has been struggling against social democrats, that this latest move to restrict speech which is being carried out by the Guardian should be regarded as a victory of sorts over the Guardian. They are in fact conceding that the people in the various ethno-nationalist camps—globally—have a level of influence over mainstream public opinion which has been able to move the mainstream out of lockstep with social democrats.

Counterpropaganda involves shining a light in the darkness, and the Guardian’s desire to retreat into the darkness when hit with that light only further reveals the perniciousness of their propaganda campaign, and also its fundamental weakness.

                                       
                                        Holloweenie,  Dildoween

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